


Beyond The Sea

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [15]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Episode Related, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Gunshot Wounds, Minor Character Death, Prison, Skeptic Turned Believer, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 22:29:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4238976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had watched storms blow in and out often enough to know that even the wrong wind could bring a boat home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond The Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 1.12 "Beyond The Sea"  
> A/N: Wikipedia's entry on the hierarchy of angels says that "seraph" can also mean serpent, and that seraphim burn. I thought it was a nice bookend to Scully's experience with cherubim in "All Souls".  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

Her father died and her heart lost its anchor. She became a ghost ship, adrift, a hollow hull with only the memories of feelings to crew her. Scully floated in bed at night on the sea of her own emptiness. Work was the only rudder she could cling to, to give her life direction. 

She had seen him. He had spoken to her. She hadn't caught many of the words, though the shape of his mouth looked familiar. Inscrutable code, like semaphore or the flicker of signal lamps on the ships she'd watched a hundred times as a girl. She couldn't tell Mulder. He would try to comfort her with a thousand ghost stories. But she knew, despite the evidence of her eyes, that her father was no ghost. She had absorbed enough of Mulder's expertise by now. William Scully was not the kind of man to leave unfinished business. He had always settled his accounts. He was gone. 

Mulder called her Dana and cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand and she almost, almost felt the weight of him like a sea anchor, mooring her in the moment. His thumb brushed her cheekbone. His skin was warm, and softer than she'd expected. And then the moment was over, and she was drifting again, with her eyes on the horizon of the case.

In one of the drawers there was a file. Of course there was. She had found it almost immediately, acquainted now with Mulder's intuitive filing system. It was enough to know it was there. She wasn't alone in her madness. 

Boggs seemed so terribly alone in his.

It was easy to loathe Boggs. Easy to dismiss him. He was a greasy, shivering man who seemed unrepentant despite the enormity of his crimes. But he looked into her and she knew he could hear the echo of the emptiness inside her. She was grateful for Mulder, who stood between them, solid as a wall. She might have laughed at the way they had changed places, if she had been able to find the place where she'd once kept laughter. But laughter was gone, scoured away by the sea breeze that had wafted her father's ashes across the waves. 

She tried hard to remember that sometimes blessings came in disguise. If it was possible for her father to die, perhaps it was possible that a killer might offer them truths. The wind could change at any moment. She had watched storms blow in and out often enough to know that even the wrong wind could bring a boat home. Meanwhile, Boggs' strained and tuneless rendition of the old French song her parents had danced to kept drifting through her mind at every quiet moment. It would haunt her dreams, she thought. 

A shot rang out and Mulder fell. She cared more about that than about the girl, which pained her, but only later, when Mulder was at the hospital, no longer bleeding into the lining of her coat. She couldn't lose him. She couldn't. There wasn't a person who could bear that. He had been in her life for all of nine months, but they had come to matter to each other in a way she couldn't quantify. Their partnership had survived to term; it had become something more than the sum of them. To lose them both in such a span of days would founder her forever.

She railed at Boggs like she'd railed at God when her grandmother had died, and it didn't bring any of them back. It didn't change a single thing. At the hospital, she paced up and down until they would let her see Mulder. He was remarkably calm, dosed to his limits with painkillers. 

In the hierarchy of angels, there was no place for Boggs, though he was a serpent, though he burned. She could not regret his death. Neither could she let it pass unremarked. She noted the time of his execution as she sat on the edge of Mulder's bed. The second hand moved on and Boggs' life didn't. Mulder listened to her assemble her story like a ship in a bottle, delicately, holding her breath. His hand rested on her arm, warm, but not as warm as it should be. They were still too close for comfort to a cold dark place, to a white cross spattered with scarlet.

"It's over," he mumbled, his eyelids heavy. "It's over, Scully. We're all right."

"We will be," she said, brushing his hair off his brow as his eyes closed. For a while, she listened to the sound of his breathing like the sigh of the sea.

It was a weary drive back to the hotel. There was no way that she would leave Mulder, and he couldn't be moved. She would stay for a few days, file her report, visit her partner, and then they would catch a flight away from all of this. The room was chilly and sterile, less comfortable than the morgue. She pulled the scratchy comforter around herself and turned on the television. The drone of late-night infomercials was too closely familiar, invoking the memory of the vision of her father. Scully closed her eyes. She could still see him so clearly, delivering his message. She made her own lips shape the words until she could whisper them. _The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want._ No, he had had no unfinished business. He had always told her what she needed to know. Of course he had. He was her father.

Grief rose in her sweetly, like a tide in the spring, lofting her heart to catch the wind. In the hotel room, she wept until her pillow was damp, and then she called her sister, so far from home.


End file.
